Part 6 of a series

Who's Missing From the Courtroom? Cruz-Guzman and the Case for Active Stakeholder Involvement

Part 6 of a series examining the Cruz-Guzman litigation and Minnesota's constitutional obligation to provide an adequate education

Minnesota's courts are in the process of deciding whether the State is meeting its constitutional obligation to provide every child with an adequate education — one that meets, in the words of Skeen v. State, “all state standards.” That is not a modest question. Depending on how the case is ultimately resolved, the answer could reshape school funding, staffing, and instructional practice across the state for a generation.

And yet the people with the deepest stake in the outcome — metro-area school districts, educator organizations, parent groups, and a substantial share of the very families in the plaintiff class — are, for the most part, nowhere to be found in the litigation. Of particular concern is the apparent lack of involvement of experts in educational improvement and reform. Where are the leading experts in what works for the students we are leaving beind? Where are the parent groups who are spearheading efforts to reform? That silence should worry everyone who cares about how this case comes out. A class action is designed to represent those in the community, and lawyers can't represent their clients properly without maintaining a rigorous communication with the clients, their families and those who serve them and understand their needs. The Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs have quality attorneys, in comparison to many other similar litigations, efforts to work with the community seems lacking. The danger is that the plaintiffs lose touch with the objectives most important to the clients and communities they serve.

A case conducted without collaborating with stakeholders

This is not how many of the most effective education litigations typically work. They engage in transparent active communication with the communities they serve. For example, in Kentucky's landmark case, the lead plaintiff was itself a coalition — the Council for Better Education, a nonprofit whose membership consisted of sixty-six local school districts, joined by additional district boards and twenty-two named students suing through their parents.

Ohio's litigation was organized the same way: the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding grew from five districts into a council of governments representing nearly every school district in the state, and drew twelve amicus briefs from sixteen organizations — including one filed on behalf of 37 state legislators — when the case reached the Ohio Supreme Court. New York's Campaign for Fiscal Equity was built the same way from the outset: a coalition of community school boards, parent advocacy organizations, and individual citizens, joined in the complaint by fourteen of New York City's thirty-two school districts as co-plaintiffs, with the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center, and the Alliance for Quality Education weighing in as amici. In each of these cases, the districts, families, and institutions whose obligations a remedy would ultimately reshape were part of building the record from the start. Cruz-Guzman has none of that.

In California, the students whose testimony drove Williams v. California had documented the conditions themselves, and after the 2004 settlement, the plaintiffs' counsel trained parents and students statewide to monitor implementation through community conventions and a published organizing guide. In New York, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity and the Alliance for Quality Education toured school districts directly, gathering firsthand accounts from superintendents and communities to inform both the litigation and the compliance fight that followed the state's initial noncompliance. In New Jersey, implementation of the Abbott v. Burke remedy was paired with a grant-funded organizing collaborative built specifically to give parents in Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson an active hand in shaping how the court-ordered reforms were carried out on the ground, not merely a seat as passive beneficiaries. None of that — no youth conventions, no district tours, no organizing collaborative — has any counterpart in Cruz-Guzman.

A case decided without the districts it will affect

When the State first moved to dismiss Cruz-Guzman for failure to join the school districts and charter schools as necessary parties, the Minnesota Supreme Court rejected the argument. The plaintiffs were seeking relief solely against the State, the Court reasoned, and “many non-parties are bound to be affected by a judicial ruling in an action regarding the constitutionality of state statutes or state action, but they cannot all be required to be a part of the suit.” Cruz-Guzman v. State, 916 N.W.2d 1 (Minn. 2018). But that issue should not have been presented to the Supreme Court in the first place. This failure to involve the school districts represents a mutual abdication of responsibility by the districts and by the plaintiffs, who should have found a way to come together for a common goal. In all of these districts there are powerful players who advocate for the status quo. But throughout the metro districts their are visionary advocates for finance reform, for supportive accountability, and for implementing effective practices. If the Cruz-Guzman leadership reached out to them, and energized them, they could be a powerful force for constitutional change.

The Supreme Court's decision that school disticts need not be compelled to participate, may have been marginally defensible for the claim as it then stood — a request for a declaration that the State had violated the Education Clause. But it is worth pausing on what it did not decide. It did not decide that districts, teachers or other stakeholders have no legitimate interest in how the case comes out. It did not decide that a remedy — if one is ordered — can be crafted without their participation. It decided only that, at the pleading stage, plaintiffs could proceed against the State alone.

To be successful, Cruz-Guzman must find a way to communicate with the absent districts, absent experts and absent advocacy organizations, and particularly those on the cutting edge of reform. Producing a high quality education requires expertise and experience. As I discussed in Part 3 of this series, the operative Amended Complaint reaches well beyond school assignment and integration — it implicates funding adequacy, staffing, and instructional practice. If the case proceeds toward a remedy on that scale, the interests of non-party districts, unions, and schools look a great deal more like the interests the Court of Appeals found dispositive in SCERAC than like the diffuse “everyone is affected by every declaratory judgment” interest the Supreme Court dismissed in 2018.

What happens when the right voices aren't in the room

A federal court in Minneapolis offered a vivid illustration of the risk just last week. In United States v. Board of Directors of Special School District No. 1, the Department of Justice sued Minneapolis Public Schools over race-based provisions in its teachers' contract — provisions the district had negotiated jointly with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. The court made clear it had serious doubts about the legality of what MPS had agreed to. But it never reached that question. Because the Union — the other party to the very contract being challenged — had not been joined and could not be joined under the statute DOJ was suing on, the court dismissed the case. Ruling on the legality of a bargain, the court held, without hearing from the party who struck it, was not something equity and good conscience would allow.

That case turned on the formalities of federal Rule 19, in a context not identical to Cruz-Guzman's procedural posture. But the underlying instinct — that courts make better, more durable decisions about complex institutional arrangements when the people who actually run and staff those institutions are able to be heard — applies with full force here. A remedy in Cruz-Guzman that reallocates funding or mandates instructional practices without ever hearing from the districts who will implement it, the unions whose contracts it will touch, or the schools already succeeding with the state's highest-need students is a remedy built on an incomplete record. That is true whether or not Rule 19 formally requires anyone's presence.

Where everyone has gone instead

The most striking thing about the current landscape is not that districts and educator groups -- especially those with expertise in implementing effective practices -- lack a mechanism to be heard — Minnesota's rules allow intervention, amicus participation, and, in appropriate cases, court-appointed experts. It is that almost no one has used any of them.

Start with the metro districts. The Association of Metropolitan School Districts has been aware of Cruz-Guzman from the beginning — its own materials trace the origin of its “Reimagine Minnesota” initiative to a March 2016 meeting of superintendents held explicitly against the backdrop of the newly filed suit. By AMSD's own account, a number of superintendents were approached and encouraged to have their districts join the litigation “on behalf of the state in order to defend our local control, our school district boundaries, and our financial stability.” They chose a different path: rather than participate in the case, they built a parallel initiative focused on cultural competency, staff diversification, and personalized learning. Whatever the merits of that initiative, the effect has been that the districts whose funding, staffing, and boundaries the litigation could ultimately reorder have spent nearly a decade adjacent to the case rather than in it.

The absence of educator organizations are harder to explain. If a remedy in Cruz-Guzman reaches staffing practices, professional development requirements, or instructional mandates — all squarely within the scope of what the Amended Complaint seeks — the unions representing the teachers who will carry those mandates out have as direct an interest as the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers had in its own contract in the DOJ case above. They have not sought to intervene, filed no amicus brief, and have not, so far as the public record shows, engaged with the litigation at all. Again, while certain educator organizations are advocates for the status quo, there are many educators in these organizations who could eloquently assist the plaintiffs and their experts in understanding what Minnesota's education system requires.

Charter schools have one voice in the case — Higher Ground Academy, participating as an intervenor. HGA is a genuinely important data point: it serves an entirely non-white, overwhelmingly low-income population and posts non-ELL proficiency rates roughly double the statewide average, powerful evidence that the plaintiffs' and the State's shared assumption — that racial and socioeconomic composition alone drives outcomes — is incomplete. But one school's intervention is not a substitute for the charter sector's collective voice, and it leaves the case's evidentiary record thinner than it should be on exactly the question — what actually works for high-need students — that ought to be central to any adequacy remedy.

And then there are the families. A meaningful number of parents and students within the certified class — in my own conversations with educators and parents around the state — do not agree with the litigation strategy the named plaintiffs and their counsel have pursued, particularly its emphasis on racial and socioeconomic balancing to the exclusion of the broader menu of evidence-based practices that Part 5 of this series discusses. Those voices, too, have no organized presence in the case.

The stakes of staying silent

None of this means Cruz-Guzman's current parties are acting in bad faith, or that the case should have been dismissed for non-joinder in 2018. It means that a case with the potential to restructure how Minnesota funds, staffs, and delivers education to its highest-need students is being litigated and will likely be decided without hearing from most of the people who understand, from the ground, what would actually improve outcomes for those students.

That is a recipe for one of two bad results. Either the case produces a sweeping remedy built on a record that never heard from the districts, NGO advocates, and leading education experts and from educators who will have to carry it out — and that remedy proves unworkable, is resisted, or gets undone in a second round of litigation the way the DOJ's case against Minneapolis was. Or the case produces no meaningful remedy at all, and the students the Education Clause was written to protect are left exactly where they started, this time with a judicial record that will make it that much harder to try again.

Minnesota's rules give districts, educator organizations, parent groups, and community stakeholders real ways to be heard — as intervenors, as amici, or by urging the court to appoint a neutral expert capable of evaluating the full range of evidence about what works. Those doors have been sitting open for nearly a decade. It is well past time for the people who actually run Minnesota's schools, teach in its classrooms, and send their children to it, to walk through them.

Next in series

Strategies for influencing the Cruz-Guzman parties toward a broad, multi-factor adequacy framework.

Part 5 of a series

Cruz-Guzman Series, Part 5: Beginning With the End in Mind — What an Adequate Education Actually Requires

1. No single lever gets you there

Part 1 of this series argued that no single reform lever — integration, funding, staffing, or curriculum — can by itself deliver a constitutionally adequate education; the causes of inadequacy are plural and interacting. Providing an education that meets all state standards cannot be achieved by introducing one change — not class size alone, not teacher salary alone, not integration alone, nor any other single lever standing by itself. In Part 3, we showed that contrary to popular belief, Cruz-Guzman is not an integration only litigation. The Cruz-Guzman amended complaint broadly addresses multiple remedies. In this post, we discuss the experience of individual schools that are actually producing exceptional results for high-need students: those schools meld multiple changes and improvements together, in coordinated, mutually reinforcing ways, rather than betting everything on one intervention. In a subsequent post, we'll discuss some strategies that educational advocates might use to encourage the parties in Cruz-Guzman to focus on the broad comprehensive reforms that can transform Minnesota's public education so that it acheives the constitutional mandate of providing an adequate education to each student, one that meets all state standards.

2. What does the effective-practices research actually say?

Fortunately, this is not a question we have to answer from first principles. There is a substantial body of empirical research — separate from, and largely uninterested in, the integration/segregation debate — asking a narrower question: among schools serving similar high-poverty, high-EL populations, what distinguishes the schools that produce strong achievement gains from the schools that don't?

The most influential of this research comes from Harvard economist Roland Fryer and his collaborator Will Dobbie. In a 2011 study of 35 New York City charter schools, they found that the input measures policymakers traditionally fight over — class size, per-pupil spending, the share of teachers with advanced degrees — were not correlated with school effectiveness. What was correlated, and explained roughly half the difference between high- and low-performing charter schools, was a bundle of five concrete, operational practices: more instructional time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, and high-dosage tutoring.

Fryer then tested whether these were merely “charter school” practices or general principles of effective schooling by importing them into twenty of the lowest-performing traditional public schools in Houston, in a randomized field experiment. The result: the changes produced an average achievement gain of roughly 0.2 standard deviations in math per year — comparable to the effects reported for attending a high-performing charter school. Fryer's own conclusion is worth sitting with: the best practices of high-performing charter schools may simply be general lessons about the education production function — meaning they are not ideological artifacts of the charter sector, but transferable operational knowledge about how schools actually work.

This matters for our purposes because it gives us an empirically grounded, non-ideological checklist against which to evaluate any school — traditional or charter, integrated or not — and against which to evaluate what the legislature would actually need to fund to meet the Skeen standard.

3. Two adequacy studies reach the same conclusion from a completely different direction

It is worth pausing on this convergence, because two other bodies of work — approached from an entirely different methodology — arrive at nearly the same operational picture.

The first is the 2018 Michigan school finance adequacy study by Picus, Odden & Associates, commissioned to determine what it would actually cost the state to fund an adequate education. Where Fryer and Dobbie started from statistical analysis of charter-school effectiveness, the Michigan study started from the research literature on individual school-improvement elements and then costed out what a school would need to deploy each one. The “high-performance school model” the study's authors built their funding recommendations around describes essentially the same operational picture as the Fryer bundle. High-performing and improving schools, the study found, organize teachers into collaborative grade-level or subject-area teams — not isolated classrooms — that meet regularly during the school day to plan curriculum, review short-cycle assessment data, and adjust instruction based on what the data shows. Those teams are supported by dedicated instructional coaches, funded at a rate of roughly one coach for every 200 students, whose job is to model lessons, observe teachers, and give direct feedback. The model funds a minimum tutoring position in every school plus additional tutors triggered by poverty and EL enrollment, on the same high-dosage, data-targeted logic as the Fryer bundle — and it insists all of this rests on a foundation of explicit, ambitious, school-specific achievement goals and a professional culture where “instruction is public,” meaning staff are expected to use, and be held accountable for using, the practices shown to work rather than teaching in isolation according to individual preference.

Parenthetically, we note that the work of Bruce Baker and others provide persuasive critiques of the use of “Evidence Based Funding” to determine the funding necessary to deliver an adequate education. See for example, Bruce Baker, School Finance 101: When Evidence Based Isn’t: Informing State School Finance Formulas to Provide Equal Educational Opportunity for All We cite the evidence based funding research here, not in support of its funding conclusions, but rather in support of its identification of effective practices.

Another study is the Illinois Evidence Based Funding brief prepared for the state's Vision 20/20 initiative — the research summary underlying Illinois's 2017 school funding formula reform, developed by a collaborative of Illinois school leaders (IASB, IASBO, IASA, and others) working from the same Odden/Picus evidence base applied in Kentucky and Vermont. Where the Michigan study is organized around a narrative description of the high-performance school, the Illinois brief itemizes the funding model element by element — full-day kindergarten, class size, instructional coaches, tutors, guidance counselors, extended day, summer school, EL and special education staffing — with a specific effect size and dollar figure attached to each. The brief is explicit that the underlying structure is a three-tier Response to Intervention model: Tier 1 is the core instructional program made as effective as possible (small classes, collaborative planning time, sustained professional development); Tier 2 is tutoring, extended day, and summer school triggered by poverty and EL counts; Tier 3 is special education. Its summary effect-size table is a useful gut check on which investments the research actually supports and at what strength — full-day kindergarten (+0.77), instructional coaching paired with classroom application (1.25 to 2.70), one-to-one and small-group tutoring (0.4 to 2.5), targeted EL intervention (0.45), and small K-3 class size, which shows roughly double the effect for low-income and minority students (0.50) that it shows for the overall population (0.25). Notably, the same research finds no reliable achievement benefit from the two interventions state budget debates gravitate toward by default — untargeted instructional aides and secondary class-size reduction beyond the K-3 grades — which is itself a useful corrective for legislative debate.

The significance of three independent lines of research — one statistical (Fryer/Dobbie), one narrative-and-cost-based (Michigan), one itemized-and-effect-sized (Illinois) — converging on nearly identical operational requirements is that it makes the “system, not lever” argument considerably harder to dismiss as an artifact of any single methodology or state. It also gives the Skeen costing question a concrete, defensible answer: an adequate education, under this research base, costs specific, itemized things — coaching ratios, tutoring positions, collaborative planning time, EL-specific staffing — not an undifferentiated increase in the per-pupil formula. That is precisely the kind of costing exercise Minnesota has never commissioned to completion, a point later parts of this series will take up directly.

A fourth line of evidence, qualitative rather than statistical or cost-modeled, points in the same direction. Karin Chenoweth's It's Being Done series — a decade-long body of case-study reporting on public schools that post strong results for high-poverty, high-minority populations — identifies the same recurring bundle from the ground up, school by school:

1. High expectations paired with real accountability, not accountability theater
2. Curriculum built to standards, taught deliberately — not just teaching to the test
3. Systematic, embedded use of data to drive instructional decisions
4. Deliberate, protected instructional time — schools “pack the day” and eliminate low-value activities
5. Sustained, job-embedded professional development for teachers
6. Distributed leadership teams (principal + teachers + parents + community), not lone-hero principals
7. Decision rules oriented to student need over adult convenience
8. Above all — organizational/systems coherence: the practices function as an integrated system, not a menu of add-ons

Chenoweth's most recent volume in the series, Districts That Succeed, states the point directly: helping more students achieve is not a matter of adopting a program or practice. That is a practitioner-literature echo, arrived at through fieldwork rather than regression analysis, of the same convergence Fryer/Dobbie, Michigan, and Illinois reach from statistical and cost-modeling directions.

4. Coherent systems, not a menu of practices

Before turning to specific schools, one caution drawn from the same literature deserves emphasis, because it is easy to miss: effective schools do not simply adopt a smorgasbord of these practices independently. The schools that show up as outliers in the research weave the practices together into a coherent, mutually reinforcing system — one where the tutoring program is targeted using the same data the teachers use to plan instruction, where the feedback teachers receive is calibrated against the same instructional expectations the curriculum was built around, and where the culture of high expectations is the thread that holds the other pieces together rather than a poster on the wall. And, critically, these schools treat the system as a hypothesis to be tested, not a finished product: they evaluate continuously and revise what isn't working. A district that bolts a tutoring vendor onto an otherwise unchanged instructional program, without integrating it into a coherent system, should not expect Brooke- or HGA-level results — and shouldn't be surprised when it doesn't get them.

5. The practices, and how two high-performing schools use them

The evidence-based practice set

Drawing on the Fryer/Dobbie line of research and the broader charter-effectiveness literature, the recurring components are:

1. Increased and better-used instructional time — not simply a longer day, but time protected for actual instruction rather than logistics or discipline.
2. Human-capital investment in teachers — frequent, structured feedback and coaching, not annual evaluation; deliberate development of teachers over a career, not just at hiring.
3. Data-driven instruction — frequent interim assessment, with results actually used to regroup students, adjust tutoring, and modify instruction, not merely reported up the chain.
4. High-dosage tutoring — intensive, data-targeted small-group or one-on-one support for students identified as behind, rather than generic “extra help.”
5. A schoolwide culture of high expectations — a shared, explicit belief (reinforced structurally, not just rhetorically) that all students, including high-need students, are capable of meeting rigorous standards.

Brooke Charter Schools (Boston)

Brooke is a useful comparison point because it serves a population that is overwhelmingly low-income and over 90 percent Black and/or Latino, with families concentrated in Dorchester, Hyde Park, East Boston, Mattapan, Chelsea, and Roxbury, and it has posted results that place it among the strongest performers in Massachusetts — ranking in the top five in the state for student growth in both ELA and math on 2024 MCAS testing. Notably, an MIT study found that Brooke's English learner and special education students were making substantially more academic progress than in Boston's district schools, and were outperforming Brooke's own general-education students.

Brooke's own account of its model maps closely onto the research bundle above. It provides teachers with a shared, rigorous curriculum, including lesson plans and materials, freeing prep time for execution and student conferencing rather than lesson design from scratch. Every teacher — including veteran teachers — receives weekly classroom observation and direct feedback from a principal functioning as an instructional leader, not merely an administrator. Teaching teams and instructional leaders consistently use data to drive practice. A dedicated operations function handles most of the logistical work of running a school so that teachers and principals can concentrate on instruction. And the network builds its own pipeline of talent through an Associate Teacher/mentorship structure, rather than relying solely on the outside labor market.

Higher Ground Academy (Saint Paul)

HGA's own recent World's Best Workforce reports lay out its operating system in unusual detail for a charter of its size. Three points stand out.

First, instruction is organized around a specific, named instructional model — Robert Marzano's “scales and targets” framework — under which every standard is broken into leveled learning targets (1.0 through 4.0), students work at their own readiness level within a given lesson, and both students and teachers can see exactly where a student sits on the progression toward mastery. This is the district's operational definition of “student-centered learning,” and it doubles as HGA's data-driven-instruction mechanism: students are placed and re-placed on the progression using ongoing formative data, not a single annual test.

Second, HGA runs an explicit multi-tiered system of support built on the same “high-dosage, targeted intervention” logic the research literature identifies. Students are screened with the FastBridge assessment (administered at least twice a year, more often for at-risk groups) and sorted into risk categories that determine the intensity of support they receive — from classroom-level Tier I instruction, through Title I and EL-teacher-delivered Tier II support, to one-on-one Tier III intervention from a reading specialist for the highest-risk students. The same data infrastructure that identifies struggling readers also identifies students ready for acceleration.

Third, the culture-and-expectations piece is structural, not aspirational: HGA requires college acceptance as a graduation requirement, backs it with a scholarship fund that converts academic achievement into tuition credits, and reports that a considerably higher share of its graduates remain enrolled in college well after entry than the statewide average. On the discipline side, a multi-tiered PBIS system — staffed with outside mentors and in-house social workers — is credited with a sustained within-year decline in out-of-class discipline referrals, addressing the behavioral prerequisites for the academic system to function.

The results are consistent with what the research would predict from a coherent system rather than isolated interventions: on the state's most recent accountability measures, HGA's low-income (FRP), EL, and special-education subgroups substantially outperform the same subgroups both statewide and in the resident district (St. Paul Public Schools), even though HGA's overall proficiency rate — driven in part by a large and rapidly growing recent-immigrant EL population — still trails the state average. That is precisely the pattern one would expect from a school that is comparatively effective at educating its actual population rather than one that is simply serving an easier population than its comparison group.

6. How each school organized itself to be a system

The instructive part, for legislative and district-finance purposes, is not the list of practices in isolation — it's how each school built organizational structure around the list so the practices reinforce each other instead of competing for the same scarce minutes of a teacher's day.

Brooke's system is built around removing variance from the instructional core so adults can focus their energy on execution and feedback. By providing a shared curriculum network-wide, Brooke eliminates the need for individual teachers to build lessons from scratch — that time is redirected into a weekly cycle of observation and coaching. A dedicated operations function absorbs the logistical load that would otherwise compete with instructional leadership for a principal's time. Compensation and an internal teacher-pipeline (the Associate Teacher Program) are structured to retain and grow instructional talent within the network rather than losing it to turnover. In organizational terms, Brooke is a tightly coupled instructional system: curriculum, coaching, data, and staffing are all built around a single, shared definition of high-quality instruction, and very little is left to individual-classroom discretion.

HGA's system is built around a common instructional framework paired with a tiered, data-driven safety net, layered onto a population with far more linguistic and immigration-status variability than Brooke's. The Marzano scales-and-targets model gives every teacher and student a common language for where a student sits on a learning progression, which is what allows the multi-tiered support system to function — Tier II and Tier III staff can pick up precisely where a classroom teacher left off, because the framework and the data are shared. The PBIS/social-work infrastructure exists because HGA's leadership recognizes, correctly, that instructional practices cannot work in a classroom where behavioral and social-emotional needs are unaddressed — so that infrastructure is treated as a precondition for the instructional system, not an add-on. And the college-admission graduation requirement functions as HGA's structural expression of “high expectations,” operating on the output side the way Marzano's model operates on the instructional side.

Neither school's results should be read, as the Malatinszky report implicitly invites, as evidence that a single lever — integration, or funding, or curriculum — explains the outcome. Both schools show that funding plus a coherent, evidence-aligned instructional and support system produces outcomes for high-need students that neither element alone would predict. That is the Skeen question the legislature actually has to answer: not “how much money,” but “money for what system,” followed by “how much does that system cost.” Parts to come in this series will turn to that costing question directly.

Next in this series: strategies that Minnesota educators, experts, and advocates could use to influence the parties in Cruz-Guzman to focus on all of the factors necessary to deliver an adequate education.

Cruz-Guzman Experts Should Advise the Court on How to Reform Minnesota's Educaton System to Deliver a Constitutionally Adequate Education to Each Student

Part 4 of a series

Cruz-Guzman and the Malatinszky Report, Part 4: Cruz-Guzman Experts Have a Duty to Inform the Court What Strategies Will Provide Minnesota Students with an Adequate Education

Recap

We've been focusing on the expert report offered by Intervenor Higher Ground, because it has been made publicly available. In this post we show that Higher Ground's expert has actually documented that Minnesota public schools are failing to an adequate education to large segments of our students. But that report utterly fails to provide any assistance at all in answering the question, what reforms are necessary to deliver the education that the constitution requires. The Court should demand an answer to that question from every party and every expert. In Part 1 of this series, we argued that no single reform lever — integration, funding, staffing, or curriculum — can by itself deliver a constitutionally adequate education. Part 2 applied that framework to the Malatinszky report, showing that its causal question (does racial composition affect achievement?) is not the question Skeen asks. Part 3 went further: the Cruz-Guzman Amended Complaint itself is not limited to an integration remedy. Its prayer for relief asks the Court to order defendants to provide “an adequate and desegregated education” — two distinct things, joined conjunctively. The complaint pleads a freestanding strict-liability count for deprivation of an adequate education “regardless of whether or not [defendants] have caused or contributed to the deprivation.” It pleads resource-adequacy allegations on staffing, facilities, and instructional materials. It pleads a due process count. None of these theories depends on proving that racial imbalance is a “substantial factor” in anything.

This post turns from what the complaint asks for to what the record already shows. Taking Malatinszky's own reported figures at face value — his own tables, in his own amended report — the evidence of a Skeen violation is not thin. It is overwhelming. And it is not confined to the traditional public school districts the litigation has focused on; it runs straight through the charter sector as well, including many of the charter schools nominally aligned with the Intervenor's position in this case. Then, we argued that after ten years of litigation, the parties have a duty to provide the Court with a vision of what reforms are required to finally deliver each student with an adequate education that meets all standards, as both the Skeen and Cruz Guzman decisions required.

What Malatinszky's own data shows

Skeen holds that the Education Clause requires the Legislature to fund an adequate education — one that “meets all state standards.” Minnesota's statewide MCA proficiency standards are among the clearest statutory embodiments of that requirement. Malatinszky's Section 3 reports MCA/MTAS proficiency data for the 2024-25 school year. He was not asked to evaluate this data against Skeen, and he does not. But the numbers speak for themselves.

District-wide, both districts are failing most of their students:

District	Math Proficient	Reading Proficient
Minneapolis Public Schools	35.79%	40.79%
Saint Paul Public Schools	26.55%	34.82%

On Malatinszky's own figures, somewhere between roughly 60% and 75% of tested students in both districts failed to meet state proficiency standards in math or reading in the 2024-25 school year. That is not a marginal shortfall against a demanding benchmark. It is most students, in the state's two largest urban districts, not meeting the standards the state itself has set. Those statistics include all students, white and non-white, regardless of income. But the statistics on non-white and lower income students tell an even grimmer story.

The district averages understate how bad it is at the school level. Malatinszky's own Tables 5 and 7 report dozens of schools posting proficiency rates in the single digits:

School	District	Math Proficient	Reading Proficient
North High	MPS	1.43%	14.52%
Bethune Elem	MPS	3.88%	9.71%
Anishinabe Academy Elem	MPS	7.29%	11.46%
Franklin Middle	MPS	6.64%	14.69%
Olson Middle	MPS	5.96%	13.77%
Hmong International Academy Elem	MPS	8.70%	9.40%
Folwell Elem	MPS	9.04%	11.89%
Lucy Laney Elem	MPS	10.06%	17.03%
Benjamin E Mays IB World School	SPPS	4.44%	5.15%
Bruce F Vento Elem	SPPS	5.29%	12.08%
Four Seasons Elem	SPPS	6.25%	3.91%
Battle Creek Middle	SPPS	10.79%	13.95%
Harding Senior High	SPPS	9.87%	28.62%

This is an illustrative sample, not the full list. Several of these schools are independently identified by MDE's North Star accountability system as in need of comprehensive or targeted support — a designation MDE reaches through its own achievement-based indicators, entirely apart from anything Malatinszky did.

The same pattern runs through the charter sector — including charters that are, in this litigation, on the Intervenor's side of the table. Malatinszky's Tables 6 and 8 report proficiency for charter schools physically located in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The results are, in places, worse than the district schools:

Charter School	Math Proficient	Reading Proficient
Bdote Learning Ctr (Mpls)	0.00%	4.00%
KIPP North Star Academy (Mpls)	0.97%	18.81%
Aurora MS (Mpls)	3.37%	20.67%
Minnesota Transitions Charter Elem (Mpls)	2.38%	9.30%
Venture Academy MS (Mpls)	1.33%	7.14%
Lincoln International HS (Mpls)	15.69%	4.65%
St. Paul City HS (SPPS)	0.00%	13.89%
Academia Cesar Chavez ES (SPPS)	1.99%	5.96%
Career Pathways (SPPS)	4.17%	5.88%
Metro Deaf School (SPPS)	14.00%	10.20%
MMSA ES (SPPS)	10.32%	21.26%

This matters for a reason independent of Skeen. It forecloses the easiest explanation for why any one school does well or poorly — that charters as a category select more capable or more motivated families out of the district pool. If that were the whole story, charter proficiency would cluster above district averages. It does not. Most Minneapolis and Saint Paul charter schools post proficiency rates that track, and in some cases fall well below, their host district's own numbers. Whatever is driving school-to-school variation, it is not simply “charter versus district.”

Disaggregating further sharpens the point. Minnesota Report Card data on non-ELL Black students — a subgroup where the English-acquisition confound built into district-wide averages is removed entirely — tells the same story in miniature. Minneapolis: 10.1% math proficiency, 17.8% reading proficiency among non-ELL Black students. Saint Paul: 10.2% math, 20.2% reading — and Saint Paul's rate for this subgroup has been essentially flat since 2021 (8.2% math / 20.1% reading that year), never once reaching the low-30s-percent range on either measure across five years of data. Hopkins, a considerably lower-poverty suburban district: 13.1% math, 27.3% reading. St. Cloud, a district with poverty and enrollment demographics close to Minneapolis's: 15.4% math, 30.5% reading. Every one of these numbers is a Skeen violation on its own terms — a large majority of a defined group of Minnesota schoolchildren not meeting the state's own standards, year after year, in ordinary, non-selective, comprehensive public schools with no claim to be doing anything unusual.

Math and Reading Proficiency Rates for Non-ELL Black Students

Minneapolis	Math	Reading
2021	9.20%	20.10%
2022	8.90%	18.80%
2023	8.30%	17.10%
2024	8.40%	16.90%
2025	10.10%	17.80%

Saint Paul	Math	Reading
2021	8.20%	20.10%
2022	11.50%	21.80%
2023	11.30%	20.20%
2024	10.90%	20.50%
2025	10.20%	20.20%

Higher Ground Academy	Math	Reading
2021	31.80%	62.50%
2022	40.60%	67.70%
2023	40.80%	61.80%
2024	40.10%	63.50%
2025	46.50%	66.30%

Source: Minnesota Report Card, non-ELL Black student subgroup, 2021–2025.

Five years of data, not one, and the pattern never breaks. Minneapolis and Saint Paul have each spent five consecutive years failing to get even one in eight non-ELL Black students to proficiency in math, and barely one in five to proficiency in reading. Higher Ground, serving a comparably poor and entirely nonwhite population, has spent those same five years posting proficiency rates three to five times higher — and rising, not falling.

Put together, Malatinszky's own data — read against the standard he never mentions — proves the constitutional violation this litigation exists to remedy. It does so without needing his Section 4 causal analysis at all, and without regard to whether racial composition contributed anything to it.

What the complaint actually demands — and what a decade of litigation has actually produced

As Part 3 detailed, the plaintiffs are not merely asking this Court to referee a debate about school racial composition. They are asking for an adequate education — full stop, and by whatever means it takes to deliver it. The strict-liability count does not require them to identify a cause at all, but the causes are well known: inadequate funding, failure to implement effective practices, a lack of supportive accountability of the kind that deployes financial and high quality support. The resource-adequacy allegations reach staffing, facilities, and instructional materials. The due process count stands independently of the racial-imbalance theory. The constitution, as Skeen held and as Justice Hudson's opinion for the Court in this case reaffirmed, imposes a high bar: an adequate education, for every student, measured against all state standards — not a negotiated compromise, and not a showing that things would be worse under some counterfactual arrangement.

This case has now been to the Minnesota Supreme Court twice. It has consumed a decade of judicial resources on a question central to the state's future. And after all of that, the litigation — as framed by the experts retained to inform it — risks producing an answer to a narrower question than the one the constitution actually poses: whether racial imbalance, considered in isolation, is a substantial cause of inadequate outcomes. Even a definitive answer to that question, in either direction, does not tell the Court, the Legislature, or the families who are plaintiffs in this case what an adequate education requires or how to deliver it. History will not look kindly on a decade of litigation that tells us only what doesn't work, while the schools these children actually attend continue producing single-digit proficiency rates, year after year, unremedied.

The record already contains proof that better is possible

The most striking feature of Malatinszky's own data is one he does not develop: not every school serving this population is failing. Higher Ground Academy — a charter school and Intervenor in this very case — serves a student population that is 94.9% nonwhite and more than 90% eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, comparable in poverty concentration to the lowest-performing schools in Malatinszky's tables. On the same non-ELL Black student subgroup where Minneapolis posts 10.1% math proficiency, Higher Ground posts 46.5%. On reading, where Minneapolis posts 17.8%, Higher Ground posts 66.3% — roughly double the statewide average for the same subgroup, and four to five times the Minneapolis and Saint Paul rates. HGA is not a selective school; it admits by lottery, serves EL and special education students, and does not screen its population. Its results cannot be explained by skimming the strongest students out of the pool.

That is exactly the kind of evidence this Court needs and has not been given. Higher Ground has direct, first-hand experience delivering constitutionally adequate outcomes to the very population this litigation is about. It should be contributing that experience to the Court's understanding of what an adequate-education remedy looks like — not merely using its own success as a rebuttal witness against the plaintiffs' integration theory, as its briefing has done to date. The Court does not need another study of what integration does or does not cause. It needs a demonstrated, replicable account of what works.

That account exists in the research literature, and it exists in practice. Karen Hawley Miles and Karen Chenoweth's work on high-performing, high-poverty schools — most directly Chenoweth's It's Being Done and It Can Be Done, It's Being Done — catalogs schools that, like Higher Ground, serve overwhelmingly low-income students of color and post proficiency rates far above their peers, and identifies the common instructional and organizational practices that get them there. Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus's work on evidence-based school funding models translates that same research into concrete, costed staffing and program models — showing not just that effective practice exists, but what it costs to fund it at scale. And Brooke Charter Schools in Boston — a network serving a population that is over 90% Black and Latino and roughly three-quarters low-income, admitted by lottery with no academic screen — has for years posted some of the highest math proficiency rates of any school in Massachusetts. Brooke's results rest on specific, well-documented practices: extended instructional time, an intensive teacher-support and observation structure, and a relentless focus on classroom instruction over programs or technology. None of this is a mystery. It has been studied, costed, and replicated elsewhere. Minnesota's courts and Legislature do not lack a roadmap; they lack a record that puts one in front of them.

What the Court should demand — and what the constitution then requires

The Court deserves better from the experts than a record confined to the narrow question of whether integration, standing alone, causes inadequate outcomes. It should expect the parties' experts to bring it a vision for how effective practices, properly resourced and paired with real accountability, can deliver the adequate education the constitution promises — not simply a null result on one candidate explanation among many. Higher Ground's own results, sitting unused in the record of this case, are direct evidence of what that vision looks like in a Minnesota school with a demographic profile matching the schools Malatinszky found failing.

Once that record exists, the constitutional obligation is not discretionary. Skeen held that the Education Clause secures a fundamental right — enforceable in the courts, entitled to the same constitutional status as freedom of the press or freedom of religion. If the record shows what works, the Legislature does not have the option of funding something less. It must implement those effective strategies, fund them adequately, and do so in integrated schools — because the complaint, read in full, asks for nothing less than that.

Next in this series:  the specific policy architecture — effective practices, weighted funding, and reciprocal accountability — that a remedy meeting Skeen's standard would need to contain.

Part 3 of a series

Cruz-Guzman and the Malatinszky Report, Part 3: The Cruz-Guzman Defendants Ignore the Broad Scope of Plaintiffs' Complaint

Recap

Part 1 of this series argued that no single reform lever — integration, funding, staffing, or curriculum — can by itself deliver a constitutionally adequate education; the causes of inadequacy are plural and interacting. Part 2 applied that framework to the Malatinszky report, arguing that the report asks the wrong causal question by treating racial imbalance as if it operated in isolation from the other conditions that shape student outcomes.

This post steps back to a more basic legal question raised by that critique: how does Minnesota law generally handle harm that has more than one contributing cause, and how does the Minnesota Supreme Court's most recent Cruz-Guzman decision handle it in the specific context of an Education Clause claim premised on racial imbalance? This defect is particularly significant, because the Cruz-Guzman Complaint is not limited to integration, but rather demands that Minnesota deliver a comprehensive remedy: to do what it takes to deliver an adequate education.

How Minnesota law ordinarily treats harm with multiple causes

Minnesota's general law of shared responsibility for indivisible harm is instructive, even though it arises in an entirely different doctrinal setting. Under the comparative fault statute, Minn. Stat. § 604.02, liability among multiple persons whose conduct contributes to a single, indivisible harm is generally several, not joint — but that default allocation depends on the harm actually being divisible among the contributing causes. Where a defendant wants to limit its own liability by apportioning the harm among multiple causes, the burden is on that defendant to prove both that the harm is capable of division and the specific share attributable to others. Rowe v. Munye, 674 N.W.2d 761 (Minn. 2004). If the harm cannot be cleanly separated into distinct, attributable shares, each contributing party remains liable for the whole of it. Id. The Minnesota Supreme Court's two Staab v. Diocese of St. Cloud decisions apply this same principle in the context of special-verdict apportionment among concurrent causes. Staab v. Diocese of St. Cloud, 813 N.W.2d 68 (Minn. 2012); Staab v. Diocese of St. Cloud, 853 N.W.2d 713 (Minn. 2014).

The animating idea is simple, and it is not limited to comparative-fault cases: when harm results from the interaction of several contributing causes and those causes cannot be neatly disentangled, the law does not let a contributor escape responsibility merely because other forces were also at work. The burden of proving that the harm can be divided — and how — falls on the party trying to limit its own responsibility, not on the party who suffered the harm.

Cruz-Guzman's different allocation of that burden

The Minnesota Supreme Court's most recent Cruz-Guzman decision confronts a structurally similar problem — an alleged harm (inadequate education) with potentially many contributing causes — but resolves the burden question differently.

The Court held that parents pursuing an Education Clause claim premised on racial imbalance in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul schools do not need to show that the State caused the racial imbalance itself. But the Court did impose a causation requirement running from the racial imbalance to the alleged educational harm. Borrowing from tort law's proximate cause doctrine, the Court adopted a “substantial factor” standard:

“[F]or a claim like this, with potentially many different causes of the alleged inadequate education — factors that may include racial imbalances — a ‘substantial factor’ standard is appropriate. The substantial factor standard recognizes the complexities and nuances of providing an adequate education. We therefore hold that to succeed on their Education Clause claim, the parents must prove that the racial imbalances are a substantial factor in causing an inadequate education.”

The Court's holding, as stated in its conclusion, was correspondingly narrow:

“[R]acial imbalances in Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools, as compared to other schools in the same school district, are not sufficient, standing alone, to establish a violation of the Education Clause of the Minnesota Constitution. Although the parents do not need to prove that state action caused the racial imbalances, to succeed on a claim premised on racial imbalances they must prove that racially imbalanced schools are a substantial factor in causing their children to receive an inadequate education.”

In other words, where the comparative-fault framework places the burden of proving divisibility on the party trying to limit its own liability, the Court's Education Clause holding places something like the mirror-image burden on the plaintiffs: they must affirmatively isolate one strand of a multi-causal problem — racial imbalance — and prove that it independently clears a “substantial factor” threshold, notwithstanding the presence of other contributing causes.

The dissent's objection tracks the tort-law intuition

The Chief Justice's dissent makes essentially the point that Part 1 of this series makes about adequacy generally, and does so in terms that map directly onto the Rowe v. Munye divisibility problem. The dissent describes de facto segregation as the product of a “constellation of public and private forces, both historic and modern” — racially restrictive covenants, discriminatory housing finance, exclusionary zoning, wealth disparities, and bias, among others — and argues that requiring plaintiffs to prove racial imbalance is a substantial factor imposes a “two-stage” and arguably “Herculean” burden precisely because these causes, in the dissent's words, “might not be readily separable.” That is the same diagnosis that drives the divisibility rule in ordinary tort law — except that in Rowe v. Munye an inseparable, multi-causal harm works against the party trying to escape liability, while under the majority's Cruz-Guzman holding an inseparable, multi-causal harm works against the party trying to establish it.

Why this matters for the Malatinszky report

This is the doctrinal hook for the critique developed in Part 2. If the Court's substantial-factor standard requires isolating racial imbalance from the other contributing causes of inadequate education — funding adequacy, staffing, curriculum, and the rest — then an expert report that purports to supply that proof needs to actually engage the multi-causal structure of the problem: it needs to show that racial imbalance clears the substantial-factor bar net of the other forces operating on the same population of students, not merely that racially imbalanced schools and inadequate outcomes are both present. Part 2 argued that the Malatinszky report does not do this — that it treats racial imbalance as though it were the sole or primary variable, without accounting for the funding adequacy gap documented under the Skeen standard. The joint-causation framework discussed here is what makes that omission a legal problem, not just a methodological one: the “substantial factor” standard was adopted by the Court precisely because the causes of inadequate education are plural, and a report that does not test racial imbalance against the other candidate causes has not done the work the standard demands. The defense strategy is to convince the Court that integration alone cannot deliver an adequate education, and of course that is right. It fails to recognize that integration is part of a required solution, including funding, effective practices, and accountability. Its goal is to prevent the state from its constitutional responsibility by proposing that the court simply disposes of plaintiffs by ignoring the core demand of the complaint: that the legislature must provide an adequate education that meets all state standards.

The complaint itself is broader than the integration debate has treated it

Everything discussed above — the Supreme Court's substantial-factor holding, the dissent's divisibility objection, the Malatinszky report's causal framing — has unfolded inside a debate that treats the Cruz-Guzman litigation as, in essence, a school-integration-only case. That framing is understandable; racial imbalance is the theory the Supreme Court's most recent decision actually resolved, and it is the theory the Malatinszky report was commissioned to support. But it is not the only theory the plaintiffs pleaded, and the operative complaint — the Amended Complaint filed June 27, 2024 — is considerably broader than the integration remedy that has dominated the discussion.

The complaint's prayer for relief does not ask the Court to order integration only. It asks the Court to order defendants “to provide the plaintiffs forthwith with an adequate and desegregated education” — two distinct things, joined conjunctively, not one. Am. Compl. Prayer for Relief ¶ C. The word “adequate” is doing independent work in that sentence, and the body of the complaint bears that out, starting with the strict-liability count discussed in the prior post: Paragraph 74 pleads that defendants must remedy the deprivation of “an adequate education” without regard to whether they “caused or contributed to the deprivation” — a theory untethered to segregation or to any particular causal mechanism. And Paragraph 6, stated at the outset of the complaint, frames the case in exactly these terms: the defendants are obligated to act “regardless of whether the defendants have caused, contributed to, or are at fault for this inadequacy,” with the segregation-based causal theory offered only “alternatively.”

The complaint's allegations of harm likewise extend well past racial and socioeconomic composition into the operational conditions of the schools themselves — funding, staffing, and instructional capacity. Paragraph 39 alleges that the affected districts, because they must “devote disproportionately large resources to dealing with the many problems and difficulties that accompany poverty and racial segregation,” as a result “lack adequate resources to provide and maintain staffing, staff development, facilities, text books, science equipment, computers, sports and art programs, extracurricular activities, and other necessities and accoutrements of an adequate education.” That is a resource-adequacy allegation, not an integration allegation; it would remain true of a school with adequate racial balance but inadequate funding, staffing, or materials.

Paragraph 40 makes the same point using the State's own standards rather than comparative demographics: many students, the complaint alleges, “fail to perform at levels of adequacy accepted and recognized by the State,” such that “[t]he State has failed to educate these students both in comparison with other students and based on its own standards of what is adequate.” That is precisely the Skeen “all state standards” adequacy inquiry discussed earlier in this series — an inquiry that asks nothing about the racial composition of the classroom.

Paragraph 48(d) catalogs a list of practices the complaint alleges have “rendered increasingly difficult the provision of an adequate education,” including “misallocation of financial resources,” “discriminatory disciplinary procedures,” and “the improper and abusive use of Special Education services, alternative schools, Limited English Proficiency programs, magnet schools, charter schools, [and] tracking practices.” Several of these — financial misallocation, Special Education administration, and Limited English Proficiency programming in particular — are funding-adjacent and instructional-practice claims and they have nothing to do with integration as such.

Finally, the due process count in Paragraphs 71–72 rests on a theory that would apply to any inadequate school system regardless of its racial composition: because the State compels attendance and thereby “deprives students of their liberty,” due process requires that “the service be provided to them in an adequate form,” and the resulting “adequate education constitutes a property interest that the State may not abridge without due process of law.” Nothing about that theory depends on the presence or absence of racial imbalance.

Taken together, these allegations describe a complaint that seeks a comprehensive remedy — reaching funding, staffing, instructional practices, and the general conditions necessary to deliver an adequate education — of which the integration claim is one component, not the whole. The intense litigation and public attention devoted to the racial-imbalance theory, culminating in the Supreme Court's substantial-factor holding, has understandably crowded out attention to this broader pleading. But on remand, the district court will be adjudicating more than a segregation case. It will be adjudicating a case in which the plaintiffs themselves have alleged that inadequate funding, resource allocation, and instructional capacity are independent and sufficient grounds for relief — the very grounds this series has argued the Malatinszky report fails to engage. This failure is symptomatic of defendants' attempt to evade the constitutional responsibility to provide an adequate education.

Next in series

The next post in this series will address the Malatinszky report's proficiency-gap comparison and why it actually supports comprehensive relief including adequate funding, effective practices, accountability and, yes, integration.

Malatinszky's research Inadequate to Address Minnesota's Constitutional Adequacy Mandate

Part 2 of a Series • Cruz-Guzman and the Malatintsky Opinion

Integration Correlates. It Won't Deliver By Itself: What the Malatintsky Opinion Gets Wrong

Part 2 of a series on Cruz-Guzman and the Malatintsky opinion

In Part 1 of this series, we examined Minnesota's Skeen decision, which established a constitutional fundamental right requiring the legislature to provide enough funding.. In his proposed opinion testimony for the Cruz Guzman case, economist Malatinzsky attempts to show that integrated schools do no better than racially and economically isolated schools. But that research disregards the relief that Cruz-Guzman is asking for: integrated schools adequately funded, properly led, using effective practices, the full panoply of educational reforms.

Minnesota keeps looking for the single lever that will close its achievement gap. A better tenure statute. A better textbook. A more integrated classroom roster. Each of these has its advocates, and each advocate can usually point to real research showing that their reform, in isolation, correlates with better outcomes somewhere. But the evidence — and the last three decades of Minnesota litigation's futile efforts to deliver an adequate education — tells a more sobering story: no single component of the education system, changed on its own, can deliver an education that meets the state's own standards for a student who starts behind. It takes coordinated, rigorously implemented change across funding, staffing structure, curriculum, and school organization, operating together, sustained over time. Minnesota is not doing that, and the record shows it.

The bar moved. The delivery system didn't.

Until the early 1990s, Minnesota ran what is best described as a “seat-based” system. State law told districts how many hours a student had to sit in a classroom for a subject to count as a credit, along with some staffing ratios and licensure rules. It said almost nothing about what the student actually had to know when the bell rang. A district could hand out a diploma to a student who couldn't calculate ten percent of a hundred, and nothing in state law was violated.

Beginning in the 1990s, Minnesota — like Washington State and many others — abandoned that model in favor of proficiency-based standards: state-defined content standards, a testing regime to measure whether students actually meet them, and eventually programs like the LEAPS Act and dyslexia-screening mandates that specify not just what students must know, but what districts must affirmatively do to get them there.

But raising the bar and redesigning the delivery system are two different jobs, and Minnesota only did the first one. The state never went back and actually investigated what reforms are necessary to deliver the adequate education that the constitution requires, nor did it ask what it actually costs, in dollars and in organizational change, to bring a student who arrives years behind up to a proficiency standard designed around grade-level mastery.

Why a single fix can't close that gap

Once you accept that proficiency-based standards require more — more instructional time, more differentiated support, more skilled adult attention per struggling student — a second point follows almost mechanically: no single policy change supplies all of that on its own.

• Forslund v. State. The Forslund plaintiffs argued that teacher tenure and seniority rules were the constitutional problem — that ineffective teachers, protected by statute, were disproportionately assigned to disadvantaged students. Even accepting the premise, the claim asked a single personnel rule to carry the entire weight of the achievement gap — the Minnesota Court of Appeals dismissed the Forslund litigation, because the Plaintiffs had not established that merely abandoning tenure would result in delivering an adequate education.
• Cruz-Guzman v. State argued that racially and economically isolated schools were, in themselves, constitutionally inadequate, and that integration was the remedy. Racial and economic isolation is a real and serious problem, and it correlates with worse outcomes. But correlation is not the same as proof that integration alone — without also addressing funding, staffing, and instructional practice, without addressing learning time and high quality tutoring inside the newly integrated building — produces proficiency. A remedy aimed only at the seating chart doesn't answer that question.

As a result, Malatintsky's research is asking the wrong question. That integration alone does not produce an adequate education should be self-evident. But that doesn't address the relief that the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs are seeking. They are seeking interation combinded with the other key deliverables, including the adequate funding required to implement a complex of reforms. Delivering an adequate education to students who come to school with significant educational challenge is difficult work that requires an all-hands-on-deck comprehensive solution. It may well be true that integrated schools are more likely to receive adequate funding, better teachers, more challenging courses, including advanced placement and gifted education. But it is not the integration that closes gaps; it is the radical improvement in all elements of the system accompanied by adequate funding accountably allocated to the things that work. Asking if integrated schools are producing better results than racially isolated schools doesn't address the Cruz-Guzman complaint, because Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs are seeking integration in combination with adequate funding, effective practices and all the rest. By integrating schools, we give everyone a stake in assuring that everyone's chldren get the resources and practices that are necessary for an adequate education.

What actually closes gaps

The research on schools that do successfully educate high-poverty, high-need populations to real proficiency points the same direction from the opposite side. Karin Chenoweth's studies of unexpectedly successful high-poverty schools describe a common pattern: schools organized as genuine collaborative teams, under strong instructional leadership, implementing a coherent and rigorous curriculum consistently across classrooms — not a talented teacher here or there working in isolation. Allan Odden and Sarah Archibald's work on doubling student performance makes the coordination requirement explicit: closing gaps at scale requires simultaneous change in school and classroom organization, curriculum, instructional practice, professional development, and how a district recruits, develops, and deploys its teachers and principals. Take any one of those away and the rest underperforms.

Odden's later research on how new money actually gets spent adds a warning that matters directly for Minnesota's budget debates: when new revenue is provided, districts have historically spent most of it outside the core instructional program — not on the differentiated instruction, tutoring, and additional learning time the research says disadvantaged students need, but on other priorities entirely. So even the funding half of the equation isn't self-executing. Money has to be paired with a deliberate, rigorously implemented instructional strategy, or it simply gets absorbed elsewhere without moving outcomes.

Put the two halves together and the standard for constitutional adequacy comes into focus: Minnesota is not failing its disadvantaged students because of one bad statute, one weak curriculum, or one segregated building. It is failing them because no branch of government has ever required — or funded — the combination of changes that the research says is necessary, sustained long enough and implemented rigorously enough to matter. That is the standard the next generation of litigation, including the questions raised in Cruz-Guzman and the Malatintsky opinion, has to be measured against.

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Next in this series

How Cruz-Guzman and the Malatintsky opinion do — and don't — grapple with this systemic requirement.

Malatinsky Challenges Cruz-Guzman's Claim that Segregated Schools Prevent a Constitutionally Adequate Education

Malatinszky Report Series · Part 1

Cruz-Guzman, Skeen, and the Charter Intervenors' New Expert Report

Part 1 of a series on the Malatinszky expert report in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota

Setting the Stage

On July 28, 2026, counsel for Higher Ground Academy — one of the charter school intervenors in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota — filed the amended expert witness report of Aron Malatinszky. This report is now a central piece of evidence in one of the most consequential pieces of education litigation in Minnesota history, a case that has been working its way through the courts for over a decade. To understand the legal context of that report, we need to understand the Supreme Court's Skeen and Cruz-Guzman decisions.

Skeen: The Funding Case

In Skeen v. State, 505 N.W.2d 299 (Minn. 1993), the plaintiffs — 52 school districts and ten parents — challenged Minnesota's school funding formula, arguing that wealthy districts could raise far more local revenue than poor ones, creating disparities the Education Clause of the state constitution didn't allow.

What the parties agreed to before trial. Early in the litigation, the parties entered into a formal stipulation — a set of facts both sides agreed were true for purposes of the case. That stipulation matters enormously to understanding what Skeen actually decided. The parties stipulated that Minnesota's K-12 system was "a system of education which meets contemporary standards for the accomplishment of all objectives associated with formal K-12 education," and, more specifically, that "all school districts in Minnesota meet state requirements set forth in statutes, rules, and policies." In other words, everyone agreed going in that the plaintiff districts were already delivering an education that satisfied every standard the state itself had set. Nobody was arguing the schools were failing to teach what Minnesota required them to teach. This stipulation occurred at a time when Minnesota had notoriously weak standards — standards that merely required students to attend a given number of hours allocated to various required subjects. Unlike today's standards, actually learning — proficiency — was not a state standard.

So what was actually being fought over? If the districts already met every state standard, where was the line between an adequate education and an inadequate one? That was the central question in Skeen, and the two sides answered it very differently.

The plaintiff districts argued that meeting minimum state standards wasn't enough. Yes, they said, we're teaching what the state requires — but because of funding disparities, we can't offer anything beyond that baseline the way wealthier districts can: no enrichment programs, no equivalent facilities, no equivalent opportunities. That gap, they argued, violated the constitution's uniformity and equal protection guarantees even though every district was technically compliant with state standards.

The State's answer was that equal funding was simply the wrong test. The State — not the courts, and not comparative wealth — gets to define what an adequate education consists of. Once the Legislature sets those standards and funds districts sufficiently to meet them, the constitutional duty is satisfied; anything beyond that is a matter for local choice and local tax effort, not a constitutional entitlement.

The Court sided with the State — but on the State's own terms. The "all state standards" language that now anchors this entire body of law comes directly out of that stipulation — the parties' own agreed language became the measuring stick the Court adopted. The Minnesota Supreme Court held that the Education Clause requires the Legislature to "provide enough funds to ensure that each student receives an adequate education," and that a funding system is constitutionally sufficient once it provides "an adequate level of education which meets all state standards." Because the plaintiff districts conceded they already met those standards, their claim failed — not because funding disparities didn't exist, but because the constitution doesn't guarantee equal funding, only adequate funding measured against the standards the state itself has adopted.

To recap: what "all state standards" actually meant in 1993. At the time Skeen was decided, Minnesota's state standards were remarkably weak by today's measure. There was no state proficiency requirement — no requirement that a third-grader be able to read, no statewide math or science benchmark. State standards amounted mostly to inputs: minimum school-day length, minimum instructional hours by subject, staffing and licensing ratios. Nobody was measuring what students actually learned; the state measured what districts offered.

That matters, because it means the "all state standards" the Skeen plaintiffs stipulated to meeting were, by modern standards, a low bar. But the Court did not treat that bar as a static, permanent definition of adequacy. In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Attorney General's office told the Court that Minnesota was in the process of abandoning those input-based standards in favor of rigorous, outcome-based learning standards — measuring what students actually learned, not just what they were taught or how many hours they sat in a classroom. As the State's reply brief put it:

"The trial court erroneously decided to base its decision on inputs rather than upon analysis of whether students are learning what they should be learning because it believed that outcomes are not as easily measured as inputs are. What is easiest almost always is not what is right. In fact, some important outcome-type measures are already easily quantifiable… Moreover, there is uncontroverted testimony in the record that the state is moving rapidly toward being better able to use outcome based standards to compare districts and students."

The State went further, arguing that constitutional adequacy should be judged against these emerging outcome standards — "that educational opportunity needed in a contemporary setting to equip a child for his role as a citizen and as a competitor in the labor market."

That representation to the Court is not a footnote to the Skeen holding — it's part of the foundation the Court built on. The Court adopted "all state standards" as the constitutional measuring stick with the Attorney General's own assurance, on the record, that those standards were about to become proficiency-based and outcome-based. In other words, Skeen's "all state standards" requirement anticipated — and was premised on — a state standards regime built around what students actually learn, not merely what districts provide. Minnesota did go on to adopt exactly that kind of proficiency framework in the years that followed. What the Legislature has never done is tie school funding to the cost of actually delivering it.

Two things about this holding are easy to miss, and both matter for everything that follows in this series.

First, courts don't write the standards — the Legislature and its agencies do, through statute, rule, and policy. But once those standards exist, the Legislature has an enforceable constitutional obligation to fund districts sufficiently to meet them. The adequacy line isn't a judicial invention; it's borrowed directly from the state's own definition of what schools are supposed to accomplish, and it's enforceable in court against the state.

Second, the Court held that this right isn't just good public policy — it's a fundamental right, enforceable in the courts, subject to the same demanding strict scrutiny the Court applies to only its most protected constitutional guarantees. As the Court put it, education is "a fundamental right under the state constitution, not only because of its overall importance to the state but also because of the explicit language used to describe this constitutional mandate," and any challenge to that right must be evaluated under "the strict scrutiny test," which a law survives "only if it is necessary to serve a compelling governmental interest." That's a serious constitutional hook — one the Legislature cannot satisfy simply by pointing to good intentions or budget constraints.

Cruz-Guzman: Does Integration Matter Too?

Cruz-Guzman asks a different question, building on Skeen's foundation. The plaintiffs are trying to convince the courts that the Education Clause requires something more than adequate funding against state standards in the abstract — that it also requires Minneapolis and Saint Paul school districts and charter schools to provide a racially and economically balanced education. In other words, that segregation itself, regardless of funding levels, is a constitutional problem.

In the case's 2018 trip to the Supreme Court — Cruz-Guzman I, 916 N.W.2d 1 (Minn. 2018), written by Justice Hudson for the Court — the justices held the parents' claims justiciable and, along the way, reaffirmed exactly what Skeen had established: that the fundamental right to an education "was not merely a right to anything that might be labeled as 'education,' but rather, a right to a general and uniform system of education that is thorough and efficient, that is supported by sufficient and uniform funding, and that provides an adequate education to all students in Minnesota." The Court added a further point worth keeping in view for this series — that "some level of qualitative assessment is necessary to determine whether the State is meeting its obligation to provide an adequate education," and that the judiciary "cannot fulfill our duty to adjudicate claims of constitutional violations by unquestioningly accepting that whatever the Legislature has chosen to do fulfills the Legislature's duty."

When the case returned to the Supreme Court a second time, in 2023, the Court didn't fully embrace the plaintiffs' integration theory, but it didn't reject it outright either. Writing for the Court, Justice Chutich held that racial imbalance in Minneapolis and Saint Paul schools does not violate the constitution per se — imbalance alone isn't enough. Instead, to prevail in their effort to reorganize schools and districts toward racial and economic balance, the plaintiffs must show that imbalanced demographics are a substantial factor in preventing students from receiving the adequate education that Skeen guarantees. Segregation has to be shown to cause the constitutional harm, not just correlate with it.

Justice Hudson, now Chief Justice, dissented from this part of the 2023 decision — she would have gone further and held that de facto segregated schools are themselves an inadequate education, without requiring separate proof of causation. That's her dissent, not the Court's holding, but it's a view worth keeping in mind as this series continues.

The Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs recognized that inadequate state funding might be part of the problem, but their overarching focus is on the claim that racial and economic imbalance in school populations is a substantial contributing cause of Minnesota's failure to provide an adequate education. Under the Court's 2023 decision, they can only obtain relief if they prove that imbalance is a substantial factor in causing an inadequate education. That causal question — does racial and economic imbalance actually prevent students from getting an adequate education — is exactly where the charter intervenors' new expert evidence comes in.

Enter the Malatinszky Report

It's in this context that Higher Ground Academy and the other charter intervenors have presented the opinion of their expert, Aron Malatinszky. His amended report was built to speak directly to the causal question Cruz-Guzman left open. Here's what it says.

Malatinszky was asked to answer three questions: how racially imbalanced are Minneapolis and Saint Paul's district and charter schools; are those schools performing adequately; and — the central question — is school racial composition a substantial factor in causing students to receive an inadequate education.

On imbalance, using 2024-25 enrollment data and a 15-percentage-point deviation standard borrowed from federal desegregation case law, he finds that many — though not all — MPS and SPPS district and charter schools are in fact racially imbalanced relative to their district's average.

On performance, using 2024-25 state assessment data, he finds that many schools are also identified by the state's own North Star accountability system as low-performing. District-wide, only 35.79% of tested Minneapolis students were proficient in math (40.79% in reading); in Saint Paul, the figures were 26.55% math and 34.82% reading. At the individual school level, the numbers are often starker still — a number of schools post proficiency rates in the single digits.

On causation, which is the heart of the report, Malatinszky turns to two decades of statewide longitudinal student data and a student fixed-effects regression design — a method that tracks the same students over time as they experience different school compositions, rather than simply comparing different students at different schools. His conclusion: he finds no meaningful causal effect, positive or negative, of school racial composition on student achievement. That finding, he reports, holds up across Black and Hispanic subsamples, across the Twin Cities metro area and the state as a whole, and across several different control specifications.

In plain terms: Malatinszky's opinion is that racial imbalance, by itself, is not what's driving the achievement gaps in Minneapolis and Saint Paul schools — and if that's right, it directly undercuts the causal showing that Cruz-Guzman requires the plaintiffs to make.

What's Missing — And Why It Matters

That's the report on its own terms. But a few things are worth flagging before anyone treats this as the last word on adequacy in Minneapolis and Saint Paul — and they'll be the subject of the next posts in this series.

The report never engages with Skeen's actual definition of an adequate education — one that "meets all state standards" — or with the fact that Justice Hudson's 2018 opinion for the Court reaffirmed that same standard, and insisted that some qualitative assessment of outcomes is unavoidable. Funding appears almost nowhere in the analysis; the only school-level inputs modeled are teacher characteristics, not dollars. And by the report's own numbers, a substantial majority of students in both districts are not meeting state proficiency standards at all — a fact that speaks directly to the Skeen adequacy question, independent of whatever the report concludes about race.

Next in this series: What Malatinszky's own proficiency numbers say about adequacy under Skeen — even before you get to the causation question.